Page 29 of Shadow Ticket

“He looks so innocent, Alf. One can trust him, surely.” The Quarrenders tap a shuttlecock-weight glance back and forth. “See here then McTaggart, you can keep a secret can’t you, hmm no I thought not.”

“You mustn’t mind him, he’s only taking the piss again, pay no attention, I never do.”

A look from Philippa. “Alphabet Soup, you are once again committing felonious indiscretion, do take more care in your speech or one shall have to liquidate—who knows, even further than that, glaciate you.”

“Finding many new hires?”

“A dim outlook, given the budget we’ve been authorized.

Plus the competition from Germany, Russia, Japan, and so on.

Wouldn’t be interested, would you, McTaggart?

Nice espionage career? Pay is terrible to begin with, all somewhat boracic around the MI these days, you know, but one does get to mingle on an everyday basis with persons of consequence. ”

As adventuresome younger children of merchant families were once sent eastward to make their fortunes, so nowadays children of civil service families are sent out to gather not riches, but negotiable intelligence, military and political.

“Used to be a gentleman’s game. Started to go haywire I suspect as early as the first Reform Act, less and less per annum to qualify sort of thing, till we’re all taking in each other’s washing, and any angels who might be watching over us apt to be as down on their luck and knowing no more than we do. ”

“And now, as we’ve been frank and open with you, McTaggart, perhaps in your turn you might—”

“Frank and open,” mutters Hicks. “How come everybody thinks I’m being deported and you two have got me somehow in custody? When you guys know I’m only a private op.”

“Well, one hopes that’s all you are, of course.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.”

“Oh, dear,” Pips making with an eyebrow, “do you really not know? ‘Normal’? Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’ ”

“Take up shooting,” advises Alf. “Trapshooting off the fantail every day here, you know. There’ll be plenty of live targets soon enough,” adding once Hicks is out of earshot, “Man’s an idiot.”

Pips isn’t so sure. In their early careers both of them were seconded to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for instruction in how to appear, if not innocent, because who actually is, then at least thoroughly unacquainted with Secret Services either side of the Atlantic.

If Hicks’s ignorance here is pretended, then he has been trained by levels of theatrical genius quite unreachable even by Brits.

“It’s this del Vasto person he’s been talking to,” declares Philippa, “a millionaire with no visible day job? Violating the A. J. Raffles principle that a successful jewel thief needs a legitimate cover, such as star cricketer, to divert attention from what he’s really up to, sharing with cricket bowlers especially a kitful of deceptive skills, as we know from the film. ”

“Ronald Colman wearing a blazer on the pitch,” Alf mutters, “not cricket really.”

Alf and Pips have had a careful eye for a while on Porfirio, having spotted the gag right away—provoking amusement or class resentment to direct attention away from the brush passes, handoffs, and drops of his real trade.

“Either a jewel thief or a spy. Travels everywhere and never has to bring out a sixpence. Handed thousands of miles of free globe-trotting per year, unconditionally and off the books, like a maharaja in the newsreels—one by one they come creeping up to him with their gifts of translocation and velocity, pilots, travel agents, airline executives, only time he ever slows down is to collect a freebie or sell one off. Meantime down inside a vault under some Alp, his secret bank accounts continue to grow.”

“And then there’s the wife,” Philippa archly.

“Ex-wife, according to her. You think she’s in on it?”

A don’t-waste-my-time smile. “Not Hicks’s innocence I’m concerned about, it’s hers. He could corrupt the girl so easily.”

“Now, Pip Emma…” warns Alf.

“Someone has to tell him, he’s a loaded weapon, not that you’d be the expert on that, of course.”

Pips being actually herself the hired gun around here, “Brought us through some unhopeful innings indeed, remember in Dar that time, thank goodness for the extra Webley in your pocket—”

“Oh, Alfalfa,” eye-rolling innocence, “it was KL, and I scarcely knew which end of it to point.”

Raising his gin and It, “Sticky days, my conference pear…you see,” as he later explains to Hicks, “on any given yearly audit, it was Pips who handled most of the Boy’s Own activities whilst I was only the Room 40 O.B.

crypto whiz confined in that crowded little sweatshop where we were all breathing each other’s tobacco smoke… ”

“Don’t listen to him, he loved it in there, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself outdoors.”

“Never thought I’d miss minesweeper duty that much.”

“All you had to do was drop a hint, they’d’ve been happy to redeploy you.”

They’re down in the casino decks, more extensive than you’d expect, just because a liner’s designed for speed doesn’t mean there won’t be time for cutthroat baccarat or lightning roulette, or certainly a go at the high-velocity fruit machines, though as for emotions and high drama, Hicks has seen more vivacity in old-time Wentworth Avenue opium joints during the graveyard shift.

The bar turns out to be strangely vertical, reaching down all the way to the orlop deck refrigeration spaces where the beer and champagne are kept, having over several voyages become an informal skip-tracing bureau, for not only are there more passengers aboard the Stupendica than at first appeared, but their numbers also have been strangely increasing day by day, despite no ports of call so far having been stopped at, and the overflow tends to congregate here.

Passageways long after hours clamor with what sounds like an immense unsleeping crowd, not to be explained away by corridor acoustics or the unceasing friction of the sea.

“Not too many of them exactly visible,” Alf speculates, “yet still wandering the ship at will, in and out of spaces both authorized and forbidden.”

“He’s embarrassed to say it out loud,” Pips with an upward roll of the eyeballs.

“This wasn’t always a passenger liner,” Alf doesn’t exactly explain, “converted during the War to a hospital ship…Still populated by casualties physical and psychical and those in whose care they were conveyed…unquiet stowaways with broken odds and ends of unfinished business from the War, common to all being a hope no longer quite sure and certain that injustices would be addressed and all come right in the end.”

—

Summers when he was a kid visiting his mother’s side of the family in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, out in the Driftless about twenty miles from Baraboo, “There was this what they called spiritualist camp,” Hicks remembers, “séances and so forth going on all the time.”

Hicks and his friends used to hang around Wonewoc hoping to see ghosts or other supernatural visitors, unaccountable lights up on Spook Hill after dark, sounds of warning, of lament, which couldn’t be explained away as owls or the wind. Shapes which did not respond when addressed.

“And one of your relations,” Alf guesses, “possibly a great-aunt, was in touch with other forces.”

“Cousin Begonia,” Hicks amiably, “once removed. At the time it all seemed normal. For Wonewoc anyway.”

“And the séances?”

“Once or twice. Nothing much happened. Lights out, everybody quiet, it was like listening to the radio.”

“Parlor tricks,” footnotes Philippa.

“Many are the misguided,” Alf putting a hand on hers, “who need to believe that’s all it is, poor old dear, seen it a hundred times, hasn’t she, but can’t admit it.”

While not a dues-paying member of the Society for Psychical Research, Alf is more sensitized in these matters than Philippa, who attends impatiently to her fingernails or hums music hall tunes whenever Alf reports a sighting of uncertain luminosity, or a wordless voice that might be more than wind strumming the guy wires of the radio masts.

“It’s a strange time we’re in just now,” Alf reflects, “one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved.”

Which now may have come to include recent paranoid suspicions the liner is being tracked by a mysterious submarine. Some see it, some don’t.

“There, look, see that? It’s a periscope, I tell you!”

“More like a whale spouting, if anything.”

“Report to sick bay, you’re only seeing things.”

At sunset, light coming in at a shallow angle, the view back along the wake is apt to include all manner of shapes, there for a brief flash and then gone.

“They’re looking for you in the Marconi saloon, by the way.”

Sounds to Hicks like a Third Ward speakeasy but turns out to be the radio gang’s recreational lounge, up at shelter-deck level, along with a fairly constant flow of field-tripping sorority girls in and out of the first-class dining saloons.

“Oh Phoebe, you’re such a spinthromaniac.”

“What kind of maniac did you just call me?”

“Spinthro, Sweetie, it means crazy about Sparks.”

“Oo! You—” and before anybody can step in, not that Hicks would, being content to look on, the two co-ed cuties are going round and round.

Hair gets pulled, clothes ripped, faces slapped, the usual entertainment.

It isn’t long before chaperones hired for their refereeing skills have plunged bravely between and separated the opponents.

“McTaggart?”

“Uh, this go on much around here?”

“Ever since we sailed. Come on in the shack. Maybe you heard there’s a submarine been following us.”